This month is the 50th anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis (October 16-28, 1962), so we’re
going to hear a great deal about the weeks when the world almost died. But the past is a foreign
country, a place where everything was in black-and-white and men still wore hats, so it’s just
scary stories about a long-gone time. Or so it seems.

The outlines of the tale are well known. It was 17 years since the United States had used
nuclear weapons on Japan, and the Soviet Union now had them, too. Lots of them: the American and
Soviet arsenals included some 30,000 nuclear weapons, and not all of them were carried by bombers
anymore. Some were mounted on rockets that could reach their targets in the other country in half
an hour.

At the start of the 1960s, Moscow had gained a new Communist ally in Fidel Castro, but the
United States kept talking about invading Cuba. So Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev moved some
nuclear-tipped missiles to Cuba to deter the United States from attacking the island. However, from
Cuba the Soviet missiles would be only five minutes away from their American targets. That caused
panic in Washington.

Early in October 1962 the first Soviet SS-4 missiles arrived in Cuba, and American U-2 spy
planes discovered them almost at once. President John F. Kennedy knew about them by Oct. 16, but he
did not go on television and warn the American public of the risk of nuclear war until Oct. 22.

He then declared a naval blockade of Cuba, saying that he would stop Soviet ships carrying
further missiles from reaching Cuba by force if necessary. That would mean war, and probably
nuclear war, but at least the blockade gave the Russians some time to think before the shooting
started.

The Soviet leaders were now desperately looking for a way out of the crisis they had created.
After a few harrowing days, a deal was done: The Soviet SS-4 missiles would be withdrawn from Cuba
in return for a public promise by the United States not to invade Cuba. The crisis was officially
over by Oct. 28, and everybody breathed a sigh of relief. It was closest the world ever came to an
all-out nuclear war.

What almost nobody knew until very recently is that the crisis did not really end on Oct. 28. A
new book by Sergo Mikoyan,
The Soviet Cuban Missile Crisis: Castro, Mikoyan, Kennedy, Khrushchev, and the Missiles of
November, reveals that it continued all the way through November.

U.S. intelligence was unaware that along with the SS-4s, the Soviet Union also had sent more
than a hundred shorter-range “tactical” nuclear missiles to Cuba. They weren’t mentioned in the
Soviet-U.S. agreement on withdrawing the SS-4s from Cuba, so technically Khrushchev had not
promised to remove them.

Fidel Castro was in a rage about having been abandoned by his Soviet allies, so to mollify him,
Khrushchev decided to let him keep the tactical missiles. It was crazy; giving Fidel Castro a
hundred nuclear weapons was a recipe for a new and even bigger crisis in a year or two. Khrushchev’s
deputy, Anastas Mikoyan, who was sent to Cuba to tell Castro the happy news, quickly realized that
he must not have them.

The second half of the crisis, invisible to Americans, was Mikoyan’s monthlong struggle to pry
Castro’s fingers off the hundred tactical nuclear missiles. In the end, he succeeded only by
telling Castro that an unpublished (and in fact nonexistent) law forbade the transfer of Soviet
nuclear weapons to a foreign country. In December, they were finally crated up and sent home.

So it all ended happily, in one sense — but the whole world could have ended, instead. As Robert
McNamara, Kennedy’s defense secretary in 1962, said 40 years later, “we were just plain lucky in
October 1962 — and without that luck most of you would never have been born because the world would
have been destroyed instantly or made unlivable in October 1962.”

Then he said the bit that applies to us. “Something like that could happen today, tomorrow, next
year. It
will happen at some point. That is why we must abolish nuclear weapons as soon as
possible.” They are still there, you know, and human beings still make mistakes.

Gwynne Dyer is a London-based independent journalist whose articles are published in 45
countries.